Helping Cities Maximize Valuable Curb Real Estate
By Jay Landers
Most well-run cities focus on water, energy, waste, highways, and parks, because everyone agrees they are essential items of infrastructure that require management. Cities and utilities work diligently to balance supply and demand, see to maintenance, and adapt when the needs of a community change. However, one critical component of urban infrastructure has been left behind — the curb.
Adjacent to every activity that happens in the urban core, the curb can be a cornerstone of city planning, business development, connectivity, and community.
But our curbs all too often fail to reach their potential. Overused as free parking spaces and unregulated loading zones and often featuring outdated signage, the curb remains one of the most overlooked, and thus inefficient, features of our cities, said Rick Neubauer, the founder and chief executive officer of the parking solutions provider Umojo. “I believe it’s time to change that,” Neubauer said.
Using real-time, historical, and predictive analytics driven by artificial intelligence (AI), cities are beginning to analyze behavior at the curb and respond dynamically. Data paints a picture of a curb that can be optimized to every location and time of day to create a safer, smarter, more efficient city. With clear, dynamic, digital signage that changes based on different scenarios, cities can finetune the curb’s function to their community’s needs at a moment’s notice.
The City of San José, California, is a prime example of a municipality looking to overhaul how it manages crucial curb space in its downtown core. Working with Umojo, San José is conducting an innovative curb-management pilot program that is intended to help the city meet multiple key goals related to climate, safety and reliability, resiliency, and equity and access.
Assigning Function to the Curb
Although demands on limited curb space continue to grow, it’s not just that more is happening at the curb. Interactions at the curb are also increasingly transactional in nature. Drivers park for minutes, not hours. Businesses exchange goods at the curb instead of in the store. Pickups and drop-offs of goods and people are more numerous than ever.
“With so many new behaviors culminating at the curb, cities must evolve to meet changing demands,” Neubauer said. “Failure to do so may result in poor use of the curb, an outcome that can pose serious threats to a community.”
In a modern city, the best use of the curb mimics the businesses nearby. In a downtown area, a curb should enable people to be dropped off at a venue or pick up lunch. But cars parking at the curb for longer periods of time can result in expired meters and loss of revenue for the city. More importantly, such activity clogs up the curb and forces double parking.
“A forgetful parker can quickly escalate into an urban hazard,” Neubauer said, noting how delivery vehicles are forced to park in lanes, pedestrians must step out into oncoming traffic to be picked up by taxis or rideshares, and drivers must circle the block looking for a spot, burning extra fuel and producing unnecessary carbon emissions.
When cities more precisely assign curb functions, they can direct longer-duration parkers to the garages and lots designed for them and reserve the curbside for shorter parking sessions, deliveries, and drop-offs, Neubauer noted. “Greater selectivity about who parks at the curb — and for how long — reinforces the value of both on-street and off-street parking,” he said.
When cities take control of the curb, they can maximize it as an asset to walkability, cyclist safety, public transit, delivery of goods, rideshare pickup and drop-off, freight loading, public gathering space, and so much more.
The key to this approach is the concept of what Neubauer calls the “flex curb” – a space that can be a loading zone, drop-off and pick up zone, and paid parking at different times of day. “The enabling factor here is dynamic, tech-driven signage that can change parking rules as the needs of a particular curb zone change in real-time,” he said.
Designing a Strategy and Measuring Utility
Regardless of a city’s curb-management goals, data is critical to unlocking a successful smart curb strategy. The first step to smart curb management involves digitizing the curb and collecting data on how it is used.
Time is the most important factor to consider, as different curb functions have different durations and demands, Neubauer said. “The value and impact of each curb function vary depending on the time of day and the day of the week,” he said.
To optimize the curb, cities need to track such activity at a granular level and adjust the practices and pricing accordingly. Having a real-time inventory of the curb also enables cities to make policy changes immediately to collect revenue from unused assets such as taxi stands, 24-hour no-parking zones, and the like. “Otherwise, cities are leaving a lot of money on the table,” Neubauer said.
Measures of utility are a key consideration when looking at time. How many people can use, or benefit from, a given curb function during a particular period? For example, if three cars park in a space for thirty minutes each throughout a given morning, this function directly affects those three drivers. However, a delivery driver who parked for that hour and a half may make deliveries to more than a dozen offices across a complex.
“Periods of time and functions of the curb are not created equal,” Neubauer said. Therefore, practices and pricing need to reflect that to ensure an effective curb strategy, he explained.
Tracking activity down to the minute is the only way to gain the precision that cities need to take on the next step, which involves analyzing the data and identifying opportunities to optimize curb use.
Selected by San José
This type of detailed analysis of curb usage is precisely what Umojo is undertaking for San José. In May 2024, the company announced that it had been selected by the city to conduct a curb digitization and management pilot project, which is funded by a 2022 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) grant program.
San José has pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030 with at least half of all trips made by transit, bike, or on foot by 2040. In 2022, San José adopted its award-winning Downtown Transportation Plan, a 20-year strategic plan for improving transportation to, from, and within the city’s downtown core.
Here is how the plan describes the current state of curb usage in San José: “Today, the parking-dominated curbs in Downtown are met with a growing need for reliable bus service, safe bikeways, efficient on-demand package and food deliveries, and enjoyable public places like parklets, outdoor dining, and green infrastructure.”
To achieve its sustainability goals, the city calls for “[complementing] complete streets with proactive curb management,” according to the plan. The plan defines this form of curb management as a “strategic and equitable approach to managing a mix of curb uses – with a goal to meet the competing demands and reduce conflicts between uses.”
Another of the plan’s strategies calls for “[exploring] demand-based pricing policy as a means of allocating public parking,” according to the plan.
To implement these strategies, San José “aims to digitize its curb inventory, study curb utilization, and develop strategies to address limited curb space into a more flexible, efficient, and responsive asset to its diverse users,” said Elias Khoury, the on-street parking manager for the San José Department of Transportation.
Pursuing the Pilot Project
In June, Umojo began stage 1 of the downtown curb management project in San José. Scheduled to last about 10 months, stage 1 experiments with the use of Umojo’s NexCity curb management platform to study curb usage within an area of 800 parking spaces throughout a specific downtown corridor, Neubauer said. “The San José team identified a general area in the city to focus the study, which represents a diverse and historically disadvantaged subsection of the city,” he noted.
Within this area, Umojo is scanning the city’s curb inventory, creating a digitized map, importing current city infrastructure data in accordance with the Curb Data Specification standard developed by the Open Mobility Foundation, and installing AI-based camera and sensor technology to monitor curb use throughout the designated area.
Once the 800-space area was identified, Umojo and the city worked closely together to identify the existing utility poles on which to place the cameras, ensuring 100% coverage of the area for full monitoring capabilities. “This process was a deep partnership between the city and the Umojo team to determine the best locations for curb monitoring based on San Jose’s SMART Grant project goals,” Khoury said.
All cameras have been installed and are collecting data. The study area has been scanned by means of LiDAR and mapped and the digital twin of the study area is live for real-time visibility into curb utilization.
The city is collecting the following types of data as part of the pilot project:
- Curb inventory data. Data on all meters, street parking spaces, loading zones, street furniture, and current signage, as well as real-time traffic data, are incorporated into the digital twin map of the study area in the platform.
- Curb utilization data. Parking occupancy, length of stay of individual parked cars, and loading zone data, including which trucks are parked in the loading zones, their length of stay, and time of use, are recorded.
- Revenue data. This data includes curb parking revenue aggregated across all meter types, by meter, by zone, by block, and by payment provider.
- Video monitoring data. Cameras take snap shots of all curb areas every 30 seconds to monitor parking, loading zone deliveries, violations, traffic issues, and the like.
- Enforcement data. Violations are monitored and analyzed in terms of where, why, and how violation trends are occurring. In certain cases, enforcement resources are alerted to address violations.
- Supply and demand data. Overall supply and demand trends in parking and loading zones are monitored and analyzed to create better strategies to improve efficiency and safety across the study area.
Stage 2 Planned
Following the successful completion of stage 1 pilot of the project, San José intends to conduct a second, larger stage.
“Stage 2 will consist of an expansion of stage 1 into a downtown-wide roll out of curb monitoring at scale with execution of the strategies developed in the initial study area phase across the city,” said Wilson Tam, the transportation planning manager for San José. “Strategies will include creation of ‘flex zones,’ or areas of the curb that can repurposed in real-time as supply and demand warrant,” Tam said.
Flex zones are implemented by installing digital signage that is integrated into the curb management platform to enable updated policy changes in real-time, Neubauer said. “For instance, a space can be changed from parking to a loading zone and back to parking,” he said.
San José is in the process of applying for additional grant funding to support stage 2 of the project. The city expects to learn sometime in the first half of 2025 if it will receive the funding. This funding will determine the time and scope of the potential stage 2.
The Rewards of Curb Management
Improved curb management is expected to help San José meet some of the goals it set forth in its Downtown Transportation Plan. Among them is the city’s aim to dramatically reduce carbon emissions associated with transportation within its urban core.
At the same time, managing the curb will enable San José “to increase its ability to implement Complete Street initiatives,” Tam said. Such initiatives, he said, will be made possible by restricting or reallocating curb uses to allow for bike lanes, transit lanes, sidewalks, street furniture, trees, and open spaces, contributing to reduced dependence on single-occupancy vehicles and vehicle-miles traveled.
Other benefits include improved safety, congestion relief, lower operating costs, and even economic growth.
Because a smart curb strategy entails many layers, interested cities should emulate San José and start small by conducting pilot programs that precisely track trends at the curb, analyze them with AI-powered insights, and take data-driven action. Also, San Jose’s open-source data are freely available for possible modification and replication, enabling interested cities to scale San José’s technology to their communities without having to start from scratch.
By starting with a handful of study areas, a municipality can understand the curb at a granular level before zooming out to the big picture and developing a city-wide plan, Neubauer noted. “Without data driving a city’s decisions, its new curb strategy risks being just as inefficient as the unmanaged curb before it,” he said.
Jay Landers is the editor-in-chief of Parking Today. He can be reached at jay@parkingtoday.com.
